What product articles did I read this month?

I'm sharing articles and podcasts that I've been reading or listening to in hopes that the content may provide value.

When I think about content to invest time in, I'm working to build insights that most content would not include. The content to me should inform me of new trends, how others have solved similar problems in novel ways, new UX / UI patterns and the impact to customer behavior, and things that challenge my heuristics, mental models or biases. As a product manager, thinking in a contrarian mindset can be hard, and importantly, it is incredibly important to argue the opposite side of a view point to ensure you grok the problem.

This month, (1) I thought about focus and depth versus breath and bets, (2) what will help achieve scale, (3) how to build user habit and what needs to be done to create a flywheel of engagement.

Articles

WhatsApp’s Cofounder On How It Reached 1.3 Billion Users Without Losing Its Focus | FastCompany

"Three and a half years ago, Facebook announced its plan to acquire messaging phenom WhatsApp for $19 billion—a price tag that was a head-snapper at the time, and remains one today. But it was only in January of this year that the WhatsApp team, which has worked out of a succession of Silicon Valley offices, moved onto the Facebook campus in Menlo Park. It occupies a wing of Building 10, where its new workspace sits behind doors with a sign making a request I can’t remember seeing at any other tech company: “Please keep noise to a minimum.” Once you get inside, the message is reinforced with additional library-esque signage such as “Quiet Zone.”

 Lessons Learned Scaling Airbnb 100X | Medium

"On my first day at Airbnb, in early 2011, I walked in to see cofounder Joe Gebbia building my desk. I had spent three months slowly convincing the fledgling startup that they needed what was called a product manager. Now, Joe encouraged me to settle in and dive deep into the website."

 Scaling Dropbox with Data | Medium - Lead with Data

Interview w/ Harshjit Sethi — Sequoia Capital, Dropbox, McKinsey

"Thanks for checking out this post from Lead With Data. So far, we have read interviews from people who run enterprise companies, gaming companies as well as direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands."

 A Unified Theory for Designing Just About Anything | Medium

"A few years back I was obsessed why the question of why some companies rocked at one thing, and sucked at another. How could Amazon be so good at Information Architecture & Interaction Design, and yet so bad at Graphic Design (and Apple software the opposite: pretty and pretty unusable.) I mean, they could afford hire endless numbers of designers, right?"

 This Is Why No One Cares About Your Product, And The Secret To Building Products People Understand | Medium - the Mission

"If you’re like me and love seeing new apps and products, you probably poke around on Product Hunt ?? every day. Let’s say you find something that sounds interesting — like a product from a new startup that is (once again) trying to re-invent email marketing."

Why This Opportunity Solution Tree is Changing the Way Product Teams Work | ProductTalk

"Several teams within a week or two of each other started telling me that while they were learning a lot in our sessions together, they were struggling to see the big picture. We would jump from reviewing interview guides one week to discussing experiment results the next. Each piece in its own right was helpful, but the teams weren’t learning how to string it together on their own. I always had to tell them what to do next. My goal as a coach is to get teams doing continuous discovery on their own as quickly as possible. So I knew something had to change. I kept asking myself, how do I decide what comes next? And more importantly, how do I teach this to teams? I started by trying to be more explicit about what modern product discovery is. That led to this video."

 Moving Faster | Product Management Insider

"Moving faster doesn’t mean that your engineers type more lines of code per minute. It doesn’t mean that your designer draws any faster. And it doesn’t mean that your researchers shorten their interviews with customers. Moving faster isn’t a tactical change; it’s a paradigm shift. It’s about optimizing decision making early and ensuring that you are working on the highest leverage opportunities at any given time, even if figuring out what those opportunities are, sometimes takes more time."

 Podcasts + Videos

 Negotiation is Product Management | This Is Product Management (TIPM)

"Chris Voss, Author of Never Split the Difference, shares how to pitch a new idea to senior stakeholders and how to stay calm during a challenging conversation. Product managers negotiate every day. Whether it’s pitching a new idea, motivating the team, or asking for a raise, product managers need to know how to collaborate and influence. However, negotiation is not a part of the standard product management “curriculum.” So I interviewed one of the world’s leading experts in negotiation to his most effective techniques and how product managers can apply them to their everyday responsibilities."

 How Twitter Built User Habits | HabitSummit

Josh Elman – early product lead at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and Venture Capital Partner at Greylock Partners